Emerging Voices in Black Game Studies

Fletcher explains that “building within the ashes of fire” is something that is very common to Black life. Hush harbors, barbershops, and “the hood” are all examples of environments where Black individuals have been able to thrive and create culture despite neglect and hostility from outside environments. With the advent of Internet and video games, Black people have been given new digital worlds to explore, as well as new digital fires that make existence in these spaces difficult. It’s not just that Black representation is lacking in these games and digital spaces, but that these places, whether on World on Warcraft, Twitter, or Discord, are frequently toxic to Black existence.

Communities are being built up within and between these digital spaces to combat this toxicity; such communities allow Black people to continue to exist in these spaces and build new worlds they want to see. Dr. Fletcher uses the term ‘Black intermediality’ to describe this world between worlds or combination of digital spaces and games to create protection against hostility faced by Black gamers.

It is important to note that blackness is not a monolith, and responses to anti-blackness have been varied in the construction of the worlds. Fletcher makes it clear that these Black intermedial spaces are not defined by anti-blackness but by a love of engaging with the Black community outside of a relation to whiteness.

Reflection questions: What kinds of possibilities do these online spaces offer to Black users in contrast to offline spaces? What are the limitations of these spaces, and what are the responses to these limitations? In what other spaces do people who are marginalized or oppressed negotiate ways to thrive?

DeVeaux argues that social virtual reality (VR) allows for highly immersive environments for its users, providing avenues to digital self-representation. DeVeaux notes that, on the social VR platform VRChat, avatars are ingrained into its social fabric and “become the site for connecting, play, community-building, as well as exploring identity.” Despite these possibilities, opportunities to create avatars are affected by biases that deeply shape the racialized experiences of Black users.

Through a virtual ethnographic study, DeVeaux found that there is a default of whiteness as standard with avatar systems on VRChat. The predominant theme, DeVeaux found, was that all Black users had to consciously navigate VRChat's racial bias:

• Opportunities to customize avatars’ skin tones were infrequent, and darker-skinned avatars’ skin tones often faced technical issues that were not present for lighter-skinned avatars
• Some Black users opted to use non-Black avatars to avoid racist attacks from other users
• Black users who did want to use Black avatars had to navigate VRChat’s user-generated avatar community to request such avatars
• Some members of the avatar creator community told Black users they would have to edit their avatars themselves if they wanted non-white versions of their avatars

DeVeaux notes that social VR allows users to experience presence, or the feeling of “being there” in their environment and in their avatar. These immersive qualities of the platform mean that differences between physical and virtual avatar attributes for Black users are particularly noticeable. DeVeaux’s ongoing experimental studies will uncover more about the psychological impacts of this discrepancy.

Reflection questions: What can developers and community members of social VR platforms do to reduce biases in avatar systems? How might avatar discrepancies and a lack of customization options affect racialized users in other immersive VR contexts? How do the impacts of avatar bias show up in other digital platforms like games or social media?

Dashiell describes how Black men deal with a web of expectations of what it means to be “authentic” Black men. Drawing on prior work on Black masculinity, Dashiell notes that Black men are expected to act more mature, negotiate with their gender and cultural capital, and live in collaboration with and in defiance of societal images of Black men. Dashiell highlights how authentic Black male excellence is correlated with the ideal of achieving success through hard work.

This ideal of hard work for men in general fuels what Dashiell calls a “manchild panic,” which comes from a fear that video games are distracting men from their societal responsibilities. Recent trends towards men becoming increasingly uninterested in marriage or higher education appear to reinforce this idea, hence increased efforts to move men away from video games.

Black men have their leisure choices vilified more than other demographics, and despite the social benefits to leisure, there is a psychological cost for Black men who are unable to fully engage in leisure. People of color are often seen as illegitimate participants in virtual spaces, and Black men in particular face an othering within their communities, negotiating with the expectations placed on gamers as well as a need to retain Black authenticity. Gaming capital involves the integration of practices that are not “Black”. This puts a strain on authenticity for Black gamers, who have what Dashiell terms as a constrained masculinity that is caught between an intersection of expectations of being an authentic gamer and an authentic Black man.

Reflection questions: What does it mean for someone to be an ‘authentic’ gamer, and what ways does this gamer authenticity clash with ideas of Black male authenticity? How do internal differences of class and education within the Black male community change this relation to these conflicting ideas of authenticity? How do your own research practices account for the conflicting imperatives of identity that players and developers face?